


Stark Men are Made of Iron

by dropmyneedle



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Flashbacks, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Ned Leeds is a Good Bro, Not Spider-Man: Far From Home Compliant, Panic Attacks, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Peter Parker has PTSD, Peter Parker is a Mess, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survivor Guilt, Therapy, i mean it technically could be but i’m just trying to say there’s no spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-03 18:05:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19469278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dropmyneedle/pseuds/dropmyneedle
Summary: Look away, blink, snap your fingers and it’s all gone.Or:Peter is not okay.(no FFH spoilers! heavy on the endgame spoilers though.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hi everyone! finished another fic for this fandom, though i’m a bit nervous about it because so many people on here are so gifted in writing and i feel like i can’t compare lol  
> if you catch any mistakes PLEASE point it out.  
> also i’m not diagnosed with PTSD so idk if any of this is really accurate. next chapter will be up in a few days!

_“Hey, kid, it’s me. I just wanted to let you know that... Listen, I’m just going to cut right to the chase, your aunt is worried about you. She wanted me to check up on you, so I thought I’d try calling again. You need to open up to her more, pal. It’ll help the both of you._

_“Also, I wanted to say that... Just because Tony’s not here anymore, doesn’t mean you can’t call. He wasn’t the only one listening to your voicemails about helping old ladies across the street, you know. Just... I’m here, okay? Call me anytime.”_

The voicemail ended with the same three words as all of the others. It was funny, Peter thought, how the tables had turned, how Happy was the one leaving countless unanswered voicemails now. 

He was starting school again today. It had been a few weeks since he got back, and Midtown was able to make a plan to integrate the students that were dusted back in. It turned out that most of Peter’s friends (read: most of the decathlon team members) were dusted, so they’d all be right back where they left off. 

Well, mostly. They’d still have to catch up with the rest of the world around them. Peter wondered if this was how Steve Rogers felt when he woke up after seventy years. Granted five years is only a fraction of seventy, but it was still disorienting enough. 

Peter got out of bed and looked at his new room. After he was dusted, Tony offered to set May up in a new apartment, and the only reason she accepted was because it was too painful to live there alone, thinking of all the memories she and Peter and Ben had made. Though Peter was thankful, it just didn’t feel like home. 

Queens itself didn’t feel like home anymore. Mr. Delmar was older now, soon to retire from his sandwich making days. The familiar faces Peter saw on his way to school had aged, or weren’t there at all anymore. There were kids in Queens that had no idea who Spider-man was. 

When he stepped into his school that morning, the walls were a different color. The posters were all different. They were advertising another homecoming. There was no familiarity at all, and it all became too much for a second before he heard his name being called. 

“Peter!” Ned called from down the hall. “There you are, I’ve been looking all over for you. This is crazy, man. You’ve got to tell me something, anything-“

“No,” Peter said. “No, let’s just... Do you have your new schedule?”

Ned deflated a little and Peter raised his eyebrows, begging him not to press on about the whole ‘going-to-space-fighting-giant-purple-aliens’ thing. 

“Yeah,” the other boy said, seemingly getting the point. 

“Hey, Penis!” 

Peter felt his shoulders tense at the familiar nickname, turning at the sound of Flash’s voice. The other boy came walking up to them. 

“Hi, Flash,” Peter said. 

“Good to see your stupid face hasn’t aged,” Flash said. “Same for fatso over here. Hey, are you coming to decathlon practice? I mean it’s not like you can use your phony internship as an excuse anymore.”

The words hit like an avalanche and Peter’s ears started to ring just as his eyes started to water. He could see Flash’s lips continue to move with that same smug expression on his face, but he couldn’t hear anything that was being said. 

In that moment, Peter wasn’t in control of his body. He could feel Ned grab for his arm but wrenched it from his grip and swung his fist at Flash’s face. The blow was sloppy, so full of emotion that it lacked the normal strength and precision that he normally would use- thank God- but Flash still went toppling over and Ned lunged forward to grab Peter’s shoulders and hold him back. 

“Peter, what the hell are you doing,” Ned asked. 

People crowded around him and all Peter wanted was to run, but Principal Morita was there soon enough- he’d started to go grey since the dusting, Peter noticed- and directed him towards the office. 

It was strange, Peter thought, how even the air seemed to feel different in his lungs. Water tasted different, his clothes felt different, his body just felt different to him since coming back. Nothing felt real, it felt like he was constantly walking around in a dream, as if he was going to wake up five years ago to go on his field trip to MoMA. 

Even so, the things he experienced also seemed so real- fighting Thanos, feeling his very body fall apart, coming back and doing it all over again, watching Mr. Stark snap his own fingers and die saving the world. The blood, the battle, he couldn’t make that up in some sort of dream. It had to be real. 

“Peter,” Principal Morita started, pulling him from his thoughts. “Why did you punch Eugene?”

Peter opened his mouth, then closed it again, then opened it, sighed, and settled on shrugging his shoulders. 

The principal sighed. “Someone is coming to pick you up. Not your aunt, because she’s at work, but an emergency contact, a... Mr. Hogan?”

Peter raised his eyebrows. “What? He’s my emergency contact?”

“That’s what your aunt put down.” Mr. Morita sighed. “Peter we need to talk about your behavior. I know it can’t be easy, coming back to all this, and that Eugene can push your buttons, but you need to work with me here. Be thankful I’m only suspending you for two days. Next time you won’t be so lucky.” He looked over Peter’s shoulder. “It looks like your ride is here.”

Peter looked behind him and Happy was sitting in the office waiting chair, looking the same as when he saw him at Mr. Stark’s funeral, only less somber. Peter looked in the seat next to him and there sat none other than Morgan Stark, coloring book in hand. Peter felt both happiness and sadness rise in his chest at the same time, because when she looked up from her book her deep brown eyes were just like her father’s. 

“Looks like I’m babysitting two kids today,” Happy joked when Peter walked in. “Come on, Mo, let’s get out of here. You’re way too young for high school.”

Peter rode in the back of the car with Morgan on the way to... wherever they were going. She stared at him the whole time, and Peter periodically smiled back, though it was starting to get creepy. Eventually she spoke up. 

“Is your name Peter? Uncle Happy says your name is Peter.”

“Uh, yeah. He’s right, I’m Peter Parker.”

“There’s a picture of you and Papa in the kitchen,” Morgan said. “I like that picture. You’re giving him bunny ears.”

For the first time in a long time, Peter genuinely smiled. “Yeah, I like that picture, too.”

-

It turned out that they were heading to the Starks’ home. All Peter could think of when they drove down the winding roads to get to it was the last time he was there- the funeral. Peter pushed it from his mind when they went in the house and Morgan pulled him into the kitchen to look at the picture she had been referring to before (though he had the same one on his nightstand at home, but frankly he never got tired of looking at it and remembering back when things were okay). 

The house was cozy, not at all what Peter would associate with the Stark family. Now that his mind was a little less muddled with grief, he was able to take in the way it looked and smelled- still of coffee and motor oil. 

“Come sit,” Happy said, gesturing towards the dining room table. Peter sat. “You want something to eat?” He shook his head and Happy sat down across from him. “Okay, say something.”

“You’re not mad at me?”

Happy chuckled. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. I’d like to know what the hell happened to make you punch a kid, but considering the fact that he wasn’t being taken out of there on a stretcher, I know you had to have been holding back.”

“More like too upset to punch right,” Peter grumbled. 

“Whoa,” Happy said. “What did that kid do to you?”

Peter buried his face in his hands. “Just... He said something.”

“So what, you die once and now you go walking around punching everyone who says stuff you don’t like?”

Peter’s head snapped up. “He was talking about how I don’t have an internship to go back to.” He gulped, trying to steady his voice. “Because Mi- Because Tony...”

Whatever smile was once on Happy’s face was gone now, replaced with a sadness Peter had never seen before. 

“You know, kid,” the man began. “Not everyone is going to understand what you’ve gone through. In fact, most people have no idea. When people say these things I think it’s because they truly don’t know any better.”

Peter sighed, looking down at the table. “That doesn’t make it hurt any less when they say them.”

Happy winced. “I know.”

Who was Peter to get so emotional at the mention of Tony Stark’s death? He wasn’t Tony’s son, no matter how much they bonded over the time the man mentored him. Stark men were made of iron, and Peter was no Stark. 

They sat in silence for a while, Morgan sitting in the next room coloring. Peter realized he still had the picture in his hand, and he didn’t want to stop looking at it for a moment because if he stopped paying attention, then he might have missed the details. 

_(Look away, blink, snap your fingers and it’s all gone.)_

-

Happy and May must have talked at some point, because when she came to pick him up she wasn’t nearly as angry as Peter expected her to be. She didn’t even dole out a direct punishment, it was more of him listening to her talk about him being responsible with his powers and how he needed to start talking to her more. 

“I know you’ve been through something traumatic,” she said. “I know you’re having trouble sleeping, you don’t have to hide it from me.”

Peter only sighed, saying he knew this and he was sorry, and he’d try to be better. The difference was that he couldn’t just come out and say “hey May, every time I close my eyes I see aliens and monsters and blood and war and I don’t know how to stop it”. 

When he was allowed back at school again, there were even more eyes on him than before. Everyone stared at the new people, the ones that were dusted, but now he was known as Peter Parker: the kid who got dusted and came back punching his bully. 

He passed Flash in the hall. He had a black eye. They made eye contact and the other lacked his normal sly smile and challenging eyes. Instead his eyes held... regret? A pinch of fear. For a moment he thought Flash would come up to him, but instead he walked the other way. 

Later that day, Peter spent his free period in the library with Ned. Even his best friend seemed a little wary around him. 

“So Mr. Happy picked you up?”

“Yeah,” Peter said. 

“He had Mr. Stark’s daughter with him?”

“Yes.”

“Was he mad?”

“Of course he was mad, but...” Peter paused. “Not as mad as I expected.”

“Whoa, guys, check this out,” came a voice from the next table over. 

Peter looked over and saw three people crowding around a laptop screen, leaning in to see what was on it. On the screen was a blonde news broadcaster, gesturing to a screen behind her. 

_“As you can see behind me, construction on the Avengers Compound hasn’t started yet,”_ she said. The screen behind her enlarged and Peter felt his stomach sink looking at the wreckage. The ground was destroyed, craters all over the place from bombs and explosions. The broadcaster was saying something else, but Peter couldn’t hear anything because next they showed a ground view, and even though he knew that in the video there wasn’t a person in sight, Peter’s mind filled in the blanks and suddenly there was a blonde woman there. 

_(“Hey Peter Parker, you got something for me?”)_

There was a loud bang coming from across the room and Peter jumped so hard his knees hit the bottom of the table. He looked for the source and saw someone bending down to pick up their metal water bottle. The sound resonated in his ears and suddenly there were explosions in his head, and the chatter of his classmates turned into battle cries. His body started to tingle as if he was leaving it altogether and he wondered if he was disintegrating all over again. 

_(Look away, blink, snap your fingers and it’s all gone.)_

“Peter,” someone was saying. “Peter, are you okay?”

He opened his mouth and gasped like a fish out of water. It felt like he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Instead of responding, Peter stood up and ran. He could barely see what was in front of him as he ran down the hallways and into a bathroom, locking himself in a stall and heaving into a toilet. 

“Peter!”

Opening his eyes, Peter was grounded again. It was sudden, all at once, and it was all almost too much- the taste of bile, the smell of the bathroom, the sound of Ned calling his name. 

“Peter, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, but his voice was thready and thin and even he wasn’t convinced. 

He straightened up and flushed the toilet, ignoring the hairline cracks in the porcelain from where he was clutching it so hard, and exited the stall. 

“Take it easy, man,” Ned said. 

“I’m fine,” Peter insisted, trying to brush past him. 

“You look like you’re going to pass ou-“

“I said I’m fi-“

“Peter, _sit down!_ ”

At the instruction, Peter sat down on the bathroom floor and realized that his head really was spinning, and he probably would have collapsed if Ned hadn’t forced him to sit. His friend sat down next to him. 

“Do you need to call someone? Your aunt maybe?”

“No, she can’t leave work.”

“You could just talk to her, she doesn’t have to come get you.”

“I can’t just... She won’t understand,” Peter whispered defeatedly. 

“Well who would?” Ned asked. “I mean, you went to space, fought the guy who everyone is saying killed half the population, died, and then came back five years later and went right back to fighting. That’s a lot, Peter. No one’s going to understand, but we can listen.”

He mulled it over in his head. Ned was right- they never would understand, and he needed to stop wishing they could. Instead he should just be thankful they were there to listen. 

“When you turned to dust,” Peter began shakily. “Did you... Did you feel it?”

There was silence for a moment, then Ned shook his head. “No. I mean, it happened so fast- faster than blinking, even. I had no idea what was even going on.”

“I could feel it,” Peter said, pulling his knees to his chest. “I don’t know if it’s because of my healing or my senses or whatever, but... I could feel it before it even started, if that makes sense.” Ned only stared at him, horror evident on his face. Peter continued. “I could feel my body being torn apart, but not like if you were to rip my arm off. No, this was at the molecular level, like each of my cells was being burnt to nothing.”

More silence ensued, and when Peter looked back at Ned he found that he was crying, too. His face was blank, though, as if he didn’t even know what he was really crying over. 

Peter wiped away his tears with the back of his hand. “Yeah, so I just thought I’d share that. Sorry if I... made you upset.”

“No, dude, I’m glad you told me,” Ned replied. 

The two stood up, each quickly glancing in the mirror to make sure they didn’t look too puffy-eyed. Then they exited the bathroom and went back to the library as if nothing ever happened. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> skip westcott is mentioned, but there are no details whatsoever. just wanted to put that out there just in case anyone found it triggering!

Peter sat atop a random building just on the outskirts of Queens, looking down at the city he once knew. It was easy to feel like an outsider now, when the world seemed to go about its daily routine as if nothing had ever happened. 

As if it’s population hadn’t just doubled. 

As if the city’s crime rate wasn’t higher than ever because people were homeless and displaced and emotional and making bad decisions. 

As if Earth hadn’t just lost its greatest defender. 

_(A light going out, a crackling voice._

_“We won.”_

_Look away, blink, snap your fingers and it’s all gone._

_“You can rest now.”)_

“Peter,” Karen said. “It’s past your curfew. If you head home now, I estimate you will arrive at 2:38AM.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“I’ll have to send an alert to Ms. Stark.”

Peter scoffed, but stood nonetheless. Pepper had better things to worry about than a teenage boy sulking on some rooftop in the city. She had a daughter to look after, a company. 

She had her own grieving to do. 

With that, Peter swung off towards home.

-

Standing in his bedroom, Peter looked at his bed as if it had personally offended him. It had, in a way, dangling sleep in front of his face like it was taunting him, only to plague him with nightmares when he finally did sleep. He would frequently wake up screaming or gasping for air, because if he wasn’t dreaming about Thanos he was dreaming about Ben or the Vulture or just about any other trauma his mind decided to conjure up. 

Peter sighed tiredly. He certainly had enough trauma for one lifetime. He wanted nothing more than to just hang up the suit and retire now, to quit while he was ahead. Even so, he knew that wasn’t realistic. He would never be able to sleep at night knowing that bad things were happening and he wasn’t doing anything to stop them. 

_(“When you can do the things I can, and you don’t, and the bad things happen- they happen because of you.”)_

Sleep seemed impossible now. His mind was screaming at him to close his eyes, but he was just so scared of what would meet him when he did that he forced them to stay open. Eventually, sleep pulled him in without his consent. His sleep was fitful, just like any other night. 

When Peter woke up on that Saturday morning, he remembered that May had the day off.

Peter got out of bed and padded across the floor, peering into the hallway. He could hear May talking to someone. 

“I mean, punching people, panic attacks- this just isn’t like him,” she was saying. “I don’t know if I can help him, he just won’t talk to me. He’s been through a lot and I feel like it’s all just piling up at this point and I’m just- I’m so worried... You’d do that? I’ll talk to him about it. Thank you so much.”

Peter walked down the hall in time to see May hanging up the phone and placing it down on the table. She looked back at him with some mockery of happiness on her face (he could tell that it was pity, it always was). 

“Did you sleep okay?”

He nodded (liar) and sat down at the kitchen table. “Who were you talking to?”

“Oh, just Happy.” She hesitated. “I actually want to talk to you about something.”

May sat next to him and looked at him with a gaze that was somehow strong and hesitant at the same time. 

“I know how much you’re struggling,” she said. “Happy and I were thinking that, maybe... We could set you up with a therapist-“

“No,” Peter said. 

“-Someone who you could talk about Spider-man to, it would be confidential-“

“No way.”

“Come on, Peter!” May said. “I want to help you, the way things are going... This is no way to live, and I know you won’t talk to me no matter how much I ask. You can’t shoulder all of this on your own.”

“Do you really want me to talk to you,” Peter shouted. “Do you really want to know what goes through my head? That every time I close my eyes I’m in space, or surrounded by freaking explosions? Or how about the fact that I had to watch Mister Stark die, I had to listen to his heartbeat get weaker and weaker until it stopped? Is that what you want to hear?”

When Peter came down from his rage, he saw that May’s eyes were filled with tears and realized that he was crying, too. The boy buried his face in his hands and heard the sound of May scooting her chair over to hug him. As soon as her arms were wrapped around him, he just  _sobbed_ . He couldn’t stop once he started, and turned to hide his face in her shoulder. 

“He’s gone, May,” Peter sobbed. “He’s gone, and I’m still here, and I don’t know if I want to be.”

“Oh, honey, don’t say that.” She pulled away from the hug and used her finger to tilt his chin up so they were looking at each other. “He loved you, you know. After you were gone, he wouldn’t leave me alone,” she said with a chuckle. “He kept apologizing to me, because he took your death as a personal failure.” She paused. “Don’t do to yourself what he did for five years. There was nothing you could have done.”

Peter sighed, because there was something he could have done. He had the gauntlet at one point, he could have put it on his own hand and snapped his own fingers. He should have. He didn’t feel like arguing with her, so he just nodded. May ran a hand through his hair. 

“Think about therapy, okay? It might help you more than you think.”

He nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

He did think about it, but each time his mind went back to it he got incredibly anxious. The only other times Peter went to therapy were when Ben died, and when his aunt and uncle found out what Skip Westcott was doing to him. He didn’t want to have to go through it all again, to solidify that he wasn’t okay. If he agreed to go, it was like admitting that something was wrong, that he had something to grieve over. That Tony was gone. 

He couldn’t do it. 

Nonetheless, after his meltdown, Peter and May spent the day watching movies while Peter completed his homework for that weekend, going through a couple bags of popcorn before their Thai delivery arrived. For a moment, he forgot everything. He forgot what war sounded like, forgot the pain and the loss. 

Then it all came back to him in one wave just before he went to bed. 

-

The rest of the weekend went by swiftly. Peter didn’t patrol, because he knew his mind wasn’t in the right place to be out there stopping criminals with guns. 

Life went on, and it just felt so  bland . He didn’t feel like himself, not without Spider-man. It was hard for him to bring himself to get out of bed on Monday morning. What was the point? Go to school, robotically go through his classes, come back home to an empty apartment. 

_(“I’m nothing without this suit!”_

_“If you’re nothing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it.”)_

Nonetheless, Peter hauled himself out of bed and set off towards school in the same monotony as every other day. It was as if he blinked and suddenly appeared at school, with no recollection of the journey. A lot of days were like that lately. 

_(Look away, blink, snap your fingers and it’s all gone._

_Gone, gone, gone.)_

It was once he got to first period that he received a text from Happy. 

_**Happy** _

_I’m picking you up from school today. Don’t even think about ditching._

Peter sighed and locked his phone. This was going to be a long day. 

-

The day was, in fact, long. Long and short at the same time. He couldn’t pay attention most of the time, asleep and awake all at once. The only upside was that Flash hadn’t been trying to mess with him. 

In fact, no one tried to mess with him. Everything seemed quiet, the loudest thing being the stares of some of his classmates, their whispers of the gossip that still hadn’t died down about him punching Flash. 

Peter exited the school and looked for Happy’s Audi. He spotted it and opened the door, mind still in a haze.

Until he looked into the car and he was abruptly slammed back to Earth again. None other than Virginia Pepper Stark-Potts was sitting in the car, in the backseat, waiting for him with Happy. 

“Climb in, Peter,” she said, smiling at him. 

Pepper had some way of calming the whole room with just a grin. The movement of air around her seemed to slow, bringing Peter’s anxiety to a low. He sat down next to her, placing his backpack by his feet. 

He didn’t make eye contact, because how could he? He knew that his aunt put her up to this, took her away from her busy schedule just to speak to Peter. He had no right to make her worry about him when she had enough on her plate- she lost her husband, the father of her child. His own sadness couldn’t compare. 

They drove in silence for a while, until Pepper had obviously had enough. 

“How was school,” she asked. 

“Fine,” he said. “Uneventful.”

“I heard you got into a fight last week.” Peter didn’t respond. “Happy told me why, you don’t have to explain yourself.”

At that, he looked up at her. She still had a soft smile on her face, but her eyes held a sort of sadness- empathy, really- that Peter resonated with. It was a sadness that he didn’t think anyone understood until now. 

As if sensing Peter’s rising emotions, Pepper placed a hand on his. “Truly, I want to reprimand you for potentially killing this other kid, but it seems like he had it coming.”

Peter chuckled. Really, out loud, chuckled. He couldn’t help the smile that rose on his face and it just felt so foreign. 

They pulled into the driveway of the lake house and Peter got to Pepper’s door before Happy did, opening it for her. She thanked him, but stopped him before he went into the house. 

“Why don’t we sit by the lake,” she suggested. “Talk a little.”

Peter swallowed nervously, then nodded. He followed Pepper to a bench that sat on the far end of the lake, furthest away from the house. She sat down and he followed suit. 

“Tony used to come here a lot,” she said. “He’d come out here to think. Even bought some fishing poles and pretended he was fishing, but I think we both know that was a lie.”

Peter stared down at the water, rippling with movement, and listened to frogs croak. 

“He was also in therapy, you know,” Pepper continued, and he started, looking up at her disbelievingly. She raised her eyebrows. “What? It’s true. He’s been in therapy a few times in his life- after New York, after Ultron- and each time he got a lot out of it. He thought he was done needing therapy.” She paused, staring at him. “Then he lost you.”

Peter sat up, looking into her eyes to try and find any sign that she was lying.

“What? You think Tony didn’t grieve for you as if he’d lost his own son?” Pepper turned her body towards him, placing a gentle hand on his knee. “Just like you’re grieving the loss of a father figure.”

He tried to feel angry at her assumption, he really did- who was she to say what Tony meant to him? He lost his father at too young an age, and his uncle years later. He was done with father figures. 

That is, until he met Tony Stark. 

Even when the man yelled at him on the ferry, took away his suit, sent him home in Hello Kitty pajama pants, Peter couldn’t stay too mad at him. In fact, he almost needed the scolding, in a way. He hadn’t gotten a lecture like that since Ben died. It filled a hole that Peter didn’t even know was empty. 

Tears came to Peter’s eyes. He looked back at the water, wiping them away. 

“You don’t have to hide it, Peter,” Pepper said. “He was like a father to you, and you watched him die.”

“He wasn’t my dad,” Peter snaps before he can stop himself. “Who am I to be upset? You watched your husband die.”

Peter wanted to smack himself as soon as he said it, but if Pepper was affected by it, she didn’t show it. She didn’t flinch, didn’t falter. Instead she looked at him with somehow even more fire in her eyes. 

“He was like a father to you,” she said, enunciating every word like she was trying to solidify the idea once and for all. Pepper leaned back. “I went through this exact same thing with Tony,” she said. “He would say, ‘he’s not even mine, why am I so upset?’ Then he would imagine how May felt and send her more flowers.” 

Peter chuckled, and the chuckle turned into sobs that he soon couldn’t control. He gasped, over and over again, trying to will himself to stop. Pepper wrapped an arm around him and pulled him into her chest, the boy saturating her shirt with tears. 

“I just miss him so much,” Peter sobbed. 

“I know,” Pepper said, voice sounding slightly strained. 

They sat in silence until Peter gained control of his tears and leaned back, looking up at her. She ran a hand through his hair. 

“Just try the therapy,” she said softly. “It helped Tony, so maybe it’ll help you as well.”

“I’ll try it,” Peter whispered, and saw Pepper smile out of the corner of his eye. 

If the great Tony Stark- genius, playboy, billionaire, philanthropist, Iron Man, savior of worlds- was willing to go through therapy, maybe it wasn’t so bad for Peter to try it, either. 

_(Look away, blink, snap your fingers and it’s all gone._

_Men of iron falling victim to the clutches of grief._

_A hug shared. A death. A light going out._

_You’re no man of iron, but even you deserve to rise again.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please let me know how i did and if you’d like to see more!

**Author's Note:**

> let me know if you want to see more fics from me in this fandom!


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